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Saturday, April 08, 2017

The Pesach Story

Guest post

It will be Pesach in a few days. Millions of Jewish people,
myself included, will be sitting around their tables with family and friends
recounting the story of our ancestors' miraculous rescue from slavery in Egypt.
What is it that we'll be discussing? Is it history, handed down to us as a
faithful transmission of real events that happened to real people? Or is it
mythology, grand, fantastic stories that happened long ago in a golden age? Stories
meant to explain why the world is the way it is and to provide lessons that
guide us in the best way to live our lives. And where does the holiday of
Pesach come from? Has it been celebrated by all the generations since our
ancestors left Egypt?

Navi tells us that Pesach has not been celebrated in an
unbroken tradition passed from parent to child.

And the king commanded all the people, "Keep the Passover to
the LORD your God, as it is written in this book of the covenant." For no
such Passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel, or
during all the days of the kings of Israel or of the kings of Judah; but in the
eighteenth year of King Josiah this Passover was kept to the LORD in Jerusalem.
(2 Kings 23:21-23)

At the very least, Yoshiyahu was resurrecting a long-defunct
holiday. More likely is that he, or the Dueteronmist Kohanim he supported,
invented Pesach as an annual national holiday. The seminal event of Yoshiyahu's
reign was the discovery of "the Book of the Law," thought to be Sefer
Devarim and associated Dueteronomist works. It is in this sefer that Pesach,
and many other laws, are defined. It guided Yoshiyahu's reforms in
consolidating religious worship in the Beis HaMikdash in Yerushalayim under
royal patronage and gave religious imprimatur to his ambitions to expand his
kingdom. The Duteronomist works reflect the conditions in seventh-century Judah
so closely that most scholars think that it was written at the time as part of Yoshiyahu's
religious reforms and political ambitions. Its "discovery" during the
renovation of the Beis HaMikdash was the first step in Yoshiyahu's plans.[1]

So Pesach hasn't been celebrated continuously since the
events it memorializes, and it may have been a seventh-century BCE invention.
But that still means that Jews have been celebrating Pesach for over two-and-a-half
thousand years. What is it that we've been discussing at our sedarim for all of these centuries?

It almost certainly isn't the literal emancipation of two to
three million Jewish slaves from bondage in Egypt. For one thing, the entire
population of Egypt in the Late Bronze Age, when yetzias Mitzrayim took place,
was three to three-and-a-half million people.[2]
Two to three million people leaving Egypt would have left the country empty.
There is no record, written or archaeological, of the demographic and economic
devastation this would have caused.

There is also evidence that the number must have been much
lower from the Torah itself.[3]
Hashem tells the Bnei Yisroel that he
will drive out the inhabitants of Canaan slowly, because if the natives all
left at once, "the land would become desolate and the wild animals too
numerous for you."[4]
Three million people would have been more than enough to fully populate the
land. A few perakim later, the Torah describes
Moshe as setting up a tent outside the camp, and everyone in the camp standing
at the door to their tent and watching Moshe until he entered the tent.[5]
A camp of three million people would have been enormous. All of the people couldn't
possibly have watched Moshe walk to a tent some distance outside the camp. Nor
would it have been practical for the people to go to the tent outside the camp
to "inquire of the Lord," a distance that would have been several
days' walk.

The story itself also provides clues that it isn't literal
history. Details of the story of yetzias Mitzrayim have recognizable mythic motifs
which would have resonated with the ancient Israelites who were its original
audience. One of its central scenes, Krias Yam Suf, echoes these earlier myths.
Marduk, a Mesopotamian god, split the sea serpent Tiamat in two to create the
world of men, who live between her halves. Baal, a Canaanite god, battled with
Yam, the god of seas and rivers, and tore him to pieces.

If our a ancestors didn't leave Egypt in a great mass, then
what did happen? Is there any truth to the story at all?

There probably is some historical truth in it. Groups of
slaves did escape from Egypt from time to time. And there are parts of the
story that make sense in historical context, such as the decision to take the
southern route rather than the more direct northern route. The northern trade
route was protected by a string of Egyptian forts. So who were the group of
escaped slaves that would become the Jewish people?

Archeologists have recovered hundreds of clay tablets that
refer to a group called the "Habiru" or "Apiru." They were
people on the fringes of society, bandits, fugitives, and escaped slaves who lived in the Canaanite highlands
at the edges of the settled Canaanite kingdoms.[6] The name of
the group in Akkadian is similar to "Ivri." It may be that the Akkadian
"Apiru" became the Hebrew
"Ivri."

With this in mind, we can reconstruct a probable historical
Exodus. A group of slaves escaped from Egypt and spent some time at a desert
oasis. From there, they joined the bands of Habiru in the Canaanite highlands.
They brought with them their religion, a henotheistic faith with a jealous God
Who commanded His followers to "Have no other gods before me," but
didn't deny the existence of those other deities. They may have been influenced
by the same currents in Egyptian society that led the pharaoh Akhenaton around the
same time to briefly adopt the monotheistic worship of the sun-disc, Aten. In
time the newcomers' religion was adopted by the rest of the Habiru, and the
escaped slaves became the religious leaders. As latecomers, this new priestly
class, who came to be known as Leviim, had no hereditary territory.[7]

The story of the slaves' escape from Egypt was adopted as a
founding myth of the Habiru, even
though most of them were not descended from that group. In the same way that
the story of the Mayflower is one of the
United States' founding myths, even though most Americans are not descended
from the group that came over on the Mayflower. The highlands remained the
Habiru's seat of power, even when their religion spread to the rest of Canaan.
This was the center of the kingdom of Judah, from which the Jewish people got
our name.

This is a story of real people. It
is an epic that can speak to us across time, and in it can be seen the seeds of
modern Enlightenment values. People who
started as slaves, at the lowest rung of society, rose to regard
themselves as the Chosen Nation and to spread their ideas around the world. Many
of their laws were progressive for their time, stressing equality before the
law (for free men, anyway). On Pesach we retell the myth of our origin as
slaves and our redemption from bondage. We remind ourselves that we are
descended from slaves, that society once considered our ancestors contemptible,
and that those slaves, when given the opportunity, created a rich culture and
mythos that has been one of the most influential in history.

Why was the historical story of leaving Egypt expressed as a
myth? Why inflate the numbers and add other impossible elements? Were our
ancestors trying to fool their audiences? Probably not. Myths were the genre
that spoke to the original audience. It is an open question how literally
ancient peoples took their myths. Did the ancient Mesopotamians really believe
that the universe was literally made of a dismembered sea serpent? Did the
Romans really believe that Remus and Romulus founded their city? Do Americans
really believe that their country has its origins in the passengers on the
Mayflower?

When the Babylonian priests entered the Holy of Holies in the
great ziggurat during the New Year's festival to recite the Enumah Elish, they
didn't believe that it was a literal account of creation, or that the gods had
built the ziggurat, as their epic claimed. They knew that their ancestors had
built the temple, and that it was maintained through their own mundane efforts.
And they knew that no one knew what had happened during creation. The myth
wasn't meant to convey history. It was meant to convey ideas. So too, the story
of yetzias Mitzrayim is written as a myth, meant to convey ideas rather than
history.[8]

Like the ancients, people today don't really believe in the
literal truth of modern myths. Americans don't really believe that the United
States had its origins in the passengers on the Mayflower. The myth expresses
an ideal, not the historical reality. The ideal of religious freedom expressed
in the Mayflower myth is historically inaccurate. The Pilgrims did leave
England because the Church of England was intolerant of them, but that's not because
the Church of England was generally intolerant. It was because the Puritans
were so intolerant of other faiths and were exceedingly harsh towards religious
infractions within their own congregations. Yet the myth of the Mayflower
passengers coming to the New World in search of religious freedom informs Americans
of their ideals.

The myth of yetzias Mitzrayim, while not historically
accurate, informs the Jewish people of their ideals. Ideals of kindness towards
even the least among us, for we were once slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. It sets
its lessons in the mythic language of the Ancient Near East, yet it also tells
us that we can be efficacious in realizing its ideals in the real world. It
places common mythic elements like the splitting of the sea not it the age of the
gods, as do the myths of Marduk and Baal, but in the age of men, the age in
which we live.[9]

This post was inspired by a post a few days ago on another
blog. That post discussed academic interpretations of yetzias mitzrayim that the
author had seen on TheTorah.com. While the author expresses compassion for
those who are "troubled" by an academic understanding of the Torah,
he condemns interpretations informed by an understanding of Biblical
scholarship and mythology as kefirah, and those who hold such views as
apikorsim. He may be right, but being heretical and being true are not mutually
exclusive. When the Catholic Church condemned Galileo for heresy, they were
right that claiming the Earth orbits the Sun was heretical. And yet, it moves.

The author refused to allow any discussion of the views he condemned,
as per his policy of protecting the innocent person with emunah peshutah
who might stumble across it on his blog and be led astray. The reader is
instead left with a one-sided impression of the rightness of the traditional
view and the rishus of the academic /synthetic
view of ancient Jewish history. The latter are bad because they are apikorsus, forbidden
heretical ideas. Whether these ideas are true, whether they reflect reality, is
irrelevant. They are apikorsus, and, it follows, one who accepts these ideas is
an apikores and a rasha.

Of the four sons in the Hagaddah, I identify most with the
Rasha, the questioner who
doesn't take things for granted but, unlike the Hagaddah's interpretation of
his question, is interested in the history and practices of his people, even if
he doesn't take their theology for granted. I don't think we should have to believe
in impossible things to have access to or benefit from the rich mythical and
historical tradition all Jews are heirs to.

A story of a rag-tag group of slaves who escaped their
bondage, eked out lives on the fringes of society, and rose to prominence as
the creators of a mythos whose ideas are echoed by half the world's population
and which have shaped the history of humanity is inspiring. More inspiring, to
me, than a literal understanding of the Exodus myth, full of impossible things
that I can't hope to emulate happening to people who have little agency. Myths
communicate grand ideas, but history teaches us what real people have done, and
inspires us to emulate them.

If it relates to Jews, Judaism, holidays, Midrash,Torah, halacha or anything similar, I probably have a post on it. And if I have a post on it, I probably have a good comment thread with great reader-provided information, too.

Try a search and see for yourself. If you can't find what you're looking for ask me.

Quotes

רֹאשׁ דְּבָרְךָ אֱמֶת קוֹרֵא מֵרֹאשׁ דּוֹר וָדוֹר עַם דּוֹרֶשְׁךָ דְּרֹשׁ
Your chief word is "truth"; You've called it out since the beginning. In each generation people interpret You [for themselves] and find [their own] meaning.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd. -Flannery O'Connor

“When in the afterglow of religious insight I can see a way that is good for all humans as it is for me—I will know it is His way.” - R. Abraham Joshua Heschel

I don't accept at all the quite popular argument that the press is responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. The monarchy's responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. To blame the press is the old thing of blaming the messenger for the message. -Anthony Holden

Said behind my back

"...he's trying to show that there are other facets to Orthodox Judaism. That we don't all think one way and vote one way. And he's occasionally entertaining when he's not being mean-spirited" [PsychoToddler]"

"He's witty. He's funny. He appreciates the ridiculous in life, and has no qualms about telling you when he thinks that you're being a moron" [Cara]

" I'm pretty sure [DovBear] is a really great guy who just wants to be able to ask questions and talk about things without the fear of someone claiming he's off the derech or on his way there." [Chaviva]